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Dresses Are Fine, but Pajamas Are Divine

"Tell me!" Seen in cold print, these may not look like two of the sexiest words in the English language. But as spoken, shouted and sung by Harry Connick Jr. and Kelli O'Hara in Kathleen Marshall's delicious reinvention of "The Pajama Game," the 1954 musical that gave new meaning to labor-management relations, that simple little phrase transforms the private pleasures of pillow talk into a heady public celebration. And a little novelty number called "There Once Was a Man" becomes a rockabilly pelvis pumper that turns the thermostat way up on a show that has already been generating plenty of steam heat.

What's this? Sexual chemistry in a Broadway musical? Isn't that illegal now? If it were, then Mr. Connick and Ms. O'Hara (not to mention their red-handed director and choreographer, Ms. Marshall) would be looking at long jail terms. But as long as these stars are on the stage of the American Airlines Theater, where this frisky tale of a union dispute at a pajama factory opened last night, grown-up audiences have the chance to witness something rarely seen anymore: a bona fide adult love affair, with all its attendant frictions, translated into the populist poetry of hummable songs and sprightly dance.

Mr. Connick, best known as a velveteen crooner, and Ms. O'Hara, who here rockets past the promising ingénue status she attained with "Light in the Piazza," provide the fiery kick in a show that goes down as easily and intoxicatingly as spiked lemonade at a summer picnic. This "Pajama Game," which features an immortal pop-hit-spawning score by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, has the look of an Eisenhower-era Neverland, all striped and spotted pastels that suggest that God whipped up the world in a confectioner's kitchen. (Derek McLane and Martin Pakledinaz did the tasty candy-necklace sets and costumes.)

But Ms. Marshall -- who demonstrated a knowing affinity for 1950's musicals with her work on the revivals of "Kiss Me Kate" and "Wonderful Town" -- finds the sharper patterns of an eternal and conflicted mating dance amid the polka dots. Adapted by George Abbott and Richard Bissell from Bissel's novel "7 1/2 Cents," "The Pajama Game" is famous as the musical that improbably set its numbers to the rhythms of slow-down strikes and union meetings. But "The Pajama Game" has always been all about sex.

I know, I know. Sex as presented in 1950's mainstream entertainment can seem quaint and creepy by contemporary standards -- all winks and leers and nudges with buxom virgins on parade, the world of Billy Wilder and Ross Hunter movies at their smirkiest. But bear in mind that the film version of "The Pajama Game" (1957) allowed Doris Day, the queen of that sensibility, to deliver her most vibrant and least coy performance.

The factory girls and secretaries of "The Pajama Game" were never merely decorative objects. They had minds and spines of their own, which leveled the erotic playing field and made the central sport a fierce tug of war instead of a giggly game of hide and seek. Ms. Marshall fastens onto this aspect with happy assurance. In her "Pajama Game," it's the women who take the physical initiative and who land the first kisses.

At the show's center is the most confident and tough of those women, Babe Williams (Ms. O'Hara), head of the workers' Grievance Committee at Sleep Tite Pajamas, who catches the eye of the manly but shy Sid Sorokin (Mr. Connick), the company's new superintendent. But the course of true love never does run smooth when half the couple is union, and the other half is management, especially when their place of employment is divided by the workers' demand for a 7 1/2 cent raise.

O.K., so much for the plot (if you don't know it already). "The Pajama Game" uses this economic framework to consider an assortment of male-female relationships. In addition to Sid and Babe, there are the obsessively jealous Hines (Michael McKean), the efficiency expert, and his girlfriend, Gladys (Megan Lawrence), secretary to the miserly boss (Richard Poe). Meanwhile the company nerd, Prez (Peter Benson), lunges unsuccessfully after everything in skirts until Mae (Joyce Chittick), his nerdette soulmate, claims him for her own. Hormones, needless to say, run riot at the company picnic.

That picnic is the occasion for one of the show's most famous numbers, "Once-a-Year Day," originally choreographed (on film as well as stage) by Bob Fosse. Ms. Marshall may have been reluctant to compete with Fosse's intimidating ghost. And in the picnic scene and the legendary "Steam Heat" sequence (performed as entertainment at a union meeting), she nods politely to Fosse the maestro without finding an equally compelling style of her own. With the exception of the nightclub ballet, "Hernando's Hideaway," which scintillates with choreographic wit, the big dance pieces have an agreeable but generic sock-hop quality.

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It's in her personality-defining choreography for specific characters that Ms. Marshall shines. Every member of the company emerges as an individual, with stylistic quirks that are sometimes a tad too cute but nearly always charm. Mr. McKean (a priceless part of the spoof movie documentaries "This Is Spinal Tap" and "Best in Show") has a conversational ease with song and dance that revivify "I'll Never Be Jealous Again" (an appealingly throwaway soft-shoe with the delightful Roz Ryan) and "Think of the Time I Save." (He also effortlessly puts over the winsome "The Three of Us," one of two songs by Mr. Adler not in the original.)

Ms. Lawrence, always a distinctive presence ("Urinetown," "Two Gentlemen of Verona"), may reach a little too freely into her bag of tics as Gladys. But she certainly commands attention, and she and Mr. Connick make sweet comic music together with the suggestive plunking of piano keys in "Hernando's Hideaway." As the big bad boss, Mr. Poe is burdened with some cold war paranoia lines that I could do without. (Peter Ackerman did the book revisions for this production.) His is the only character drawn with a disruptively patronizing cartoonishness.

Ms. O'Hara and Mr. Connick, on the other hand, pulse with an immediacy that makes them, hands down, the hottest couple in the New York theater. (I suppose, if you're kinky, you could make a case for the erotic appeal of Michael Cerveris and Patti LuPone in "Sweeney Todd," but I'd rather not hear about it.) Ms. O'Hara -- who in the past has been required to be little more than sad, pretty and passive ("Piazza," "Dracula," "Sweet Smell of Success") -- expertly trades in her silvery soprano for a touch of brass. Her Babe is brisk, bright and unconditionally alluring, even (or perhaps especially) when she turns on the deep freeze. With this show, she becomes a full-fledged musical star.

So does Mr. Connick, making his Broadway debut as an actor. (He was the composer for the 2001 musical "Thou Shalt Not.") Every earlier Sid I have seen (including Hal Linden and Brent Barrett) has been in the virile, firm-voiced tradition of John Raitt, who created the part on stage and screen. Mr. Connick brings moodier, more intricately expressive vocal shadings to his songs (nicely set off by Dick Lieb and Danny Troob's orchestrations). If there is a hint of Sinatra, as there often is with Mr. Connick, it's the elegiac, love-singed Frank of the "Wee Small Hours" album. And the standards "A New Town Is a Blue Town" and, of course, "Hey There" have never before sounded so beguilingly lonely.

There are also suggestions of less dapper, more rebellious 50's sex symbols. This Sid wears a chip on his shoulder, and a tied tongue in his mouth, with the flair of a grown-up James Dean who has been to anger management classes. And in the show's blissed-out high point, "There Once Was a Man" with Ms. O'Hara, Mr. Connick even channels the restless ghost of Elvis.

Theatergoers expecting an embalmed, stuffed musical, like so many Broadway revivals these days, will be disappointed. So will folks hoping to retreat into a serenely square, Eisenhower-tailored world. Popping with percolating hormones, this "Pajama Game" reminds us that in 1954, the age of rock 'n' roll was just around the corner, and the sexual revolution was only a decade away.

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A version of this review appears in print on February 24, 2006, on Page E00001 of the National edition with the headline: THEATER REVIEW; Dresses Are Fine, but Pajamas Are Divine. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe